Falling in love with my camera again

I have upgraded to an iPhone 16 Pro. I wouldn’t say I like the trend of increasingly aggressive HDR, and noise reduction. Latter leads to hiding imperfections in human faces, almost like a beauty filter. I have owned a digital camera since I was a kid. I have pictures in my photos library that are shot on film, then my Sony DCR-TRV60E video camera, and lastly, Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z20. After that, I switched to an iPhone. Mostly for convenience. I like shooting on iPhone, but since I started to use SE 2, it didn’t feel as fun as before. Pictures I have from iPhone SE 2, and later iPhone 13 mini look a little bit too perfect and evenly shadowed. The colours are a bit too vibrant and unreal. Rich Contrast setting did make things a bit better and I regret not always using it.

I was nervous about pre-ordering the iPhone 16 Pro without knowing anything about the camera. On Thursday I sadly learned that the flagship smartphone introduced even more processing than ever, taking a crown from 15 Pro. But there’s good news, as well. Verge has written that the next generation of Photographic Styles can help reduce the processing. I use Neutral at this moment and it’s kind of similar to the Rich Contrast mode. It makes things better to my eye, pictures have more contrast and skin looks more interesting—closer to real life.

Everything changed once I tried Halide with remarkable Process Zero. After I took two pictures outside of my daughter sitting in a bike carriage, I changed the Camera Control to Halide. Process Zero uses power of RAW data and only modifies photos slightly—mostly relying on raw output and not altering a scene. I like what Halide did with this mode. Their taste matches mine. Photos with Process Zero look like photos I took with my first cameras. I am happy about superior iPhone 16 Pro optics which allow to tone done all the processing, especially when shooting outside—Halide is my default choice. The actual raw data we get from these cameras are not as bad as before.

Halide developers also introduced a video app – Kino, at first I didn’t see any difference to my iPhone 13 mini. But then I switched to Apple Log—the new default format in 1.1, and I noticed a much more interesting colour palette in the video preview. I use 24 FPS mode with 4K and LEKTAR colour settings.

When I showed the two pictures of our daughter to my wife she told me she prefers the pictures from the default iPhone Camera app. I don’t think she was 100% convinced, it’s more a matter of taste. I feel like Apple tries to appeal to as many people as possible. The same reason the Camera Control is optimised for portrait. I like older more quirky Apple which was not afraid to stand apart from Samsung with their choice of unrealistic overly-processed image processing. I think it is the right choice to give us more options this year. In future, I would like to disable HDR entirely. For now, I will keep relying on Halide.